She can make herself wait for him, she must prove it, to herself. She will wait for him until midnight or later, until after he closes. It is a test she must not fail, she is trying to gain control of her self, to push away the latticework of her need, to crawl out from inside it.
“Isn’t there someplace we can go?” he says, his voice low, nearly a whisper. “I have a few minutes. They can handle it while I’m gone.”
Through the filminess of her dress, he latches on with two fingers to the taut elastic of her panties and drags it up her bottom, like pulling a cord that turns on the electricity to a certain finely tuned instrument. Her mind is swept by a cold blankness that clarifies her thinking. She grabs his hand and removes it from her, then leads him down the alley, damp with humid night air and the dull resonance of reverberating bass notes seeping from the bars and nightclubs. One of the clubs actually has its main entrance on the alley, a bright doorway where a cluster of young drunks staggers beneath a neon sign that flashes THE CASBAH. A bald, puffy-looking bouncer in a leather jacket calls out to them as they hurry past.
“Fifty cent pitchers and two dollar shots! No cover for the lady.”
Holly has been in the Casbah before, trolling. Now that she thinks about it, she may have met Rick there—it’s only been three weeks, but it seems like a very long time ago. She tugs on his hand to make sure he knows not to go in. There are iron bars on the windows of the buildings that back onto the alley. A scrawl of graffiti mars the wall of one of them, an illegible design that looks like a group of letters but might also be a pitchfork topped with a crown. There are more people here, mostly young, in their teens and twenties, packs of them crowding the sidewalk, girls outnumbering boys. Holly thinks of them as predators, searching, seeking, their laughter somehow sinister. At the light where they wait to cross the street, a huddle of girls in jeans and tube tops surrounds a woman in a white wedding dress, complete with headpiece and a long, gauzy train. The light changes and the women lurch into the busy street, laughing, as they struggle to avoid the idling cars and keep the train of the dress off the pavement.
“I think I know them,” Rick says, glancing over his shoulder. “It’s Mitzi Kluger’s bachlorette party.”
Holly doesn’t know them—doesn’t want to know them. The red door to her shop is there, ahead of them, a few feet away. She digs the keys out of her purse, fumbles for the one that opens the shop. She tries to jam it into the hole, misses in her hurry, gouging the red paint. Tries again and feels it slot in, tongues of grooved metal interlocking. Turns the key and they are inside, the echoing chamber of the stairway leading to the second-floor shop lit only by the diffuse light of the moon reflected through broad panes of glass high above them. She leads them up quickly, feels his face a few steps behind her, seeking, directly at the level of her thighs. With the moon bouncing around the many mirrored surfaces of the salon, there is enough light to make their way. She has spent so many hours of her life here, she could lead them even if there were only darkness. She takes him to her station, her sanctuary, the place where she performs her best work. They have screwed in the back seats of cars, against the wall of a building in the alley, in his apartment, and once on the hard dry dirt of a jogging path in a city park, but this is the best yet; leading him to her sanctuary. At first she thinks of the chair in which her customers sit to have their hair cut, then she has a better idea: The chair where she washes their hair tips all the way back.
She stands next to the sink, turns to face him.
“Wait …” she says, trying it out, testing it, her mind still wanting to put it off a moment longer.
He grabs her by the wrists and pins the small of her back against the edge of the table that holds her brushes and combs, presses her down onto it, scattering the framed pictures of the girls to the floor. She struggles against him, lifts her knee into his groin and pushes him away. In the small opening this creates, she slips out from under him, yanks her arm loose, feels his fingernails claw at her skin, and even as she twirls away from him, he latches on to her hand and leads me out past the snap dragons and the azaleas, the cone flowers and the stone dish of the bird bath, all faded pale in the new shadows of the moon, their colors dim and washed away, the whirring of the cicadas shimmering over the traffic sounds, the swish of the cars going by and the calls of the Mexicans out in the street singing their dancing words to each other. The bench of the swing holds us, her small body tucked against mine.
“Higher,” she says, “make it go higher.” We kick, kick at the back of the arc, and the wind races through our ears, down in the valley, valley so low, we sang, hang your head over, hear the wind blow. We sang this Tris, our legs kicking up higher, higher. If you don’t love me, love whom you please, throw your arms round me, give my heart
ease back into the chair, feeling it slide down beneath her, tilting her head back onto the smooth lip of the sink, the U-shaped channel where the neck is supposed to go, like putting her head into a type of harness. Now he has her there, wrists pinioned against the arms of the chair, he throws his weight on top of her, the bulk of his chest pressing her down. His mouth is seeking, she feels his lips against her collarbone, then further down, to the flattened exposed flesh of her right breast. He always goes for the right one first; she arches her back to meet him. In the basement office her stepfather led her, said I have something to show you. His secret place, his sanctuary. And he opened the drawer of his metal Sears desk, brought out a small leather-bound book. Red. Its cover was bright red with gold lettering embossed into the spine, like a holy book. Rick is pulling her blouse off now, she tilts herself up in the chair and complies, undoing the bra, she helps him, his hands fiddling with the latches, tangled up with hers. The pages he flipped through in no particular hurry, not especially eager, like a lesson in school. He was going to show her something, and she knew it was somehow not right, a vibration in the air between them, hanging there, like two dissonant notes in a chord on the piano. But she wanted so much to please him, she leaned over his shoulder and there—on the glossy slick page of the book, a photograph in black and white. He paused and they saw it together, without comment, he turned the next page and another photo, he said This is what it looks like, have you ever seen it before, as if he were telling her a story. And still she trusted him to be there inside the house alone with the other girl, they seem to know him, he said I brought you something from the stables, the horseshoe rusty and brown. I came to see you girls, stopped by for a visit. The youngest one turned away. She says, “Look at the moon,” and it’s still rising past the roof of the house, it swings up and away, then down and back towards us again. “Look at the moon.” Almost full, a bright orange ball looming up in the sky, not a harvest moon yet. What do they call a full moon in August, is it a harvest moon? Up and away it swings, then down and back it approaches us, then pulls away. The feeder and birdbath are swathed in yellow light, now more golden than before. The flowers in Elmer’s bed shimmer in the light. The other girl has been inside some time now, his crooked teeth and the sweet sour smell of his cologne. “Honey, let’s stop now, it’s getting late. We better go inside her, he pushes himself close and her legs go wider, knocking against the hard metal arms of the chair, she feels her self locked into place beneath him, underneath him, within him, she rocks her back up to meet him. They are together now, at last, she has given her self to him, the bones at the base of her skull knocking against the hard ceramic lip of the sink, she feels as if she is pouring her self up out of this basin into him. There is nothing more she can do for him, she is giving all that she has to give and when he closed the red book with the startling odd pictures in it he took her hand and placed it where it wasn’t supposed to be, where she never should have left that girl inside the house with him alone, what was I thinking? I’m an old maid who has no understanding of the world, only my own little slice of it, my own little tunnel, a cave I live in, my house, my garden, and the shame of it is I have chosen this way, this enclosure, this
structure I have built around myself like a framework of steel that sustains me, holds me together. My memories, my visions hold me together. I have nobody but you. The girl tries to go ahead of me, but I hold onto her hand and keep her beside me. We go up the steps, and I pull open the screen door, and the moonlight bounces off the mirror beyond his shoulder, bounces its golden light at her as she loses her self within him, as the red book goes away for a moment it is all washed away, all the guilt and shame and anguish he bestowed upon her, all the fear wrapped up in her need to please the person who was supposed to take care of her, all wound up in a distortion like the weird tremors of light that move back and forth, back and forth from the mirror, a secret a child knows but can never say. Her head bangs hard against the ceramic lip of the sink, pounding the pain out of her, yet even so the smell of him flooding back to her mouth, smell of fish and wet hay flooding her way through the kitchen, the dishes not done, the sauerkraut still in the can, past the door to the dining room where there is no sound. I am missing my shows tonight for these girls. Usually the sound of the television fills the house, keeps the darkness outside, but nothing now. The room is dark except for the rectangle of light that comes from the living room, illuminating the breakfront.
“Wait,” I say to the girl in a whisper. I put my hand out to the wall to feel it, to hold me steady. The wallpaper is smooth and cool. I tell her with the force of my other hand to stop a moment, stay behind me, then I peer my head around the doorway into the living room.
They are sitting on the couch, a book open in front of them, a book he must have brought. I have no book in there but the Bible Karl gave me, and that is not a story book or a Bible either, then it is there like an object out of place, condemned to never fit, his hand where it should not be placed in such a matter-of-fact way she sits there transfixed, her whole body pinned down by it, that awful flat hand in the one place in all the earth where it should never be, and the only thing to do is to reach for the nearest thing I can find. I let go of the girl. The closest thing is the vase, the beautiful vase, grab it by the handle and hurl it through the door across the room. It sails so fast and misses, striking the wall above his head. His head dips down automatically to protect itself, the one thing in this house that doesn’t need protecting. It hits the wall and shatters, it flies into a bright star of fragments and the moment is broken, lying with him on top of her still, her skull a precious vessel will be broken if he keeps going this way, the small compartment that holds the giant ball of her self will be broken never one whole together again he finds himself lying awake on the king bed with the television on, the sound turned down low, staring up at the ceiling and thinking about the woman on the elevator, the woman who offered herself to him, whom he deceived and could not offer himself to. He is safe here, always taking the safest way out, the easiest way, the cleanest way out. Yet he wonders what has happened: Did she try to come and find him? Did she go back to her room first or wait a moment in the vestibule and follow him down the corridor and see him go into his room—not the room he told her. A moment of panic which swiftly converts itself into a perverse wave of hope: Perhaps she will come by and knock on the door, any second now. Of course she will. The way she smiled at him in the elevator, it wouldn’t be bad, if you had the right person with you. Of course she will—she wants him, loves him, in her mind in the elevator while he was still thinking about the floating lead-like feeling of the dinner in his stomach, she was entertaining images of the two of them trapped in the box together taking each other’s clothes off and having sex.
Now he wants her to come to his door and knock, he wills her to. This is the kind of fantasy Tris has read about in pornographic magazines, the kind of brief set up shot they use to get the action going in the pay-per-view movies he sometimes samples as a diversion to sway himself to sleep in these nameless hotel rooms he inhabits. And yet, he is so pilgrimatically programmed for the straight and narrow path that he turned this lovely woman away, he knowingly denied himself the opportunity to enjoy this beautiful woman’s body, and it fills him with regret.
Tris imagines what the woman is doing now—perhaps she’s trying to figure out a way to find him. His only hope is that she would have tried other doors, knocking on the ones nearby the one he told her. Perhaps she’s simply allowing plenty of time for him to make his calls.
Tris presses himself up off the bed and pads over to the door, looking out through the peephole. The hallway is empty, quiet. The view through the tiny opening seems to expand into a kind of rounded off perspective, the walls in one direction absurdly huge in the middle of his view and then shrinking down to a narrowing middle distance in which a few of the other doors down the hall are bent into a strange curving shape, and finally collapsing in the far distance to a kind of nothingness, an obscure edge. The view is also distorted by seeing it with only one eye, giving it a flatness that seems to compress everything towards him, depriving it of depth. His eyes blink at the effort of seeing this way, trying to maintain focus. He pulls his head back for a second, then tries again, aligning his right eye, the dominant one, to the hole, looking first left and then right down the hallway. Across the hall, an opposing door is large and almost undisturbed by the peculiar curvature that shapes the rest of the hall. Tris imagines that in some way this aperture is showing him the present moment straight ahead, with the past narrowing down towards the left and the future shrinking down to the right, both directions of the hallway empty and increasingly distant and unclear.
He has an idea—for a split second it seems like a good one. Maybe he can call the front desk and somehow reach her. But even as he backs away from the peephole, he realizes this is absurd. He doesn’t know her name or her room number—all he knows is that she’s on the eighteenth floor, and maybe even that is not true. Perhaps she just followed him to the floor he is on by not pressing another floor in the elevator. Still, he has nothing better to do. He goes to the phone and dials the hotel operator, letting it ring a long time before a man with what sounds like an Arabic accent picks up, carefully pronouncing the hotel’s pretentious marketing phrase.
“It’s a wonderful night at the Windsor. How may I help you?”
Tris frames the words in his head, deciding the best way to ask this, thinking, I’m trying to reach a woman on the eighteenth floor.
“Hello?” the Arab says, pinching the o sound into more of a rising oo. “How may I help you?”
Tris stays on the line a moment longer, then calmly puts the phone in its cradle without saying a word.
Back on the bed, Tris lies there, staring at the ceiling, and he knows now that the woman is not coming. Another opportunity lost. Another door not opened. And here he is, safe, secure in his cell. His mind slowly spins back to other situations such as this over the years, other women he turned away in favor of the confines of his marriage. He ticks them off in his head, working backwards one by one, making a list. The woman from the church Bible study group who phoned one day a year or two ago, sounding surprised to reach him, asking if she could come by to drop something off, a parcel for the outreach ministry, knowing full well he was alone and Laura was out of town, visiting her sister in Tulsa. There was the co-worker from the home office, confiding to him over drinks at a cocktail lounge in Chicago that she didn’t mind being married—she loved her husband—but she missed the wild, wanton sex she used to have with strangers.
There was the neighbor long ago when he was first married, who used to flirt shamelessly with him, dropping hints every now and then that she was available if he wanted her. Tris ticks off their names in his head, a dozen or more—too many to count really—some of them nameless, like the woman tonight, nothing more than blurry memories, each of them turned away through a combination of fear and an overriding desire to stay in the right. And this brings him back to the first one, whose name he will never forget, so long ago it seems like another person’s life. Fifty or sixty years ago it was. Whatever happened to Amelia?
The ceilin
g above his head is too low, eight feet at most, and the ceiling tiles seem to be shifting slightly, pressing down on him. The acoustic tiles are filled with thousands of little holes to absorb the sound, a dizzying random configuration like black stars in a white sky. Tris stares at these holes as they move, shift. There is something about them, one tile separated from the next by an aluminum strip. And then he sees it, in the first tile, directly above his head: A repetition. There is a certain pattern, a kind of pinwheel arc aligning one sequence of holes, like the arm of a galaxy, and as he lifts his head to look closer he sees it again, several inches away from the first, the same swirling pattern of holes.
He looks at other sections of the tile and he can see different alignments, different sizes and shapes of holes, and as his eye moves across the tile he recognizes other recurrences, other places where certain arrangements reappear. For an instant, it’s as if he’s seeing down into the sky and the wide expanse of nothingness he fell into earlier is back. The patterns are all evident—they were there all along, but his mind wasn’t attuned to this level of detail. He remembers reading something in a magazine article, something that seemed strange at the time, but makes perfect sense now. The article said that a scientist in eastern Europe, a mathematician most likely or a physicist, was debunking all the recent research about chaos and randomness. This man said there is no such thing as randomness—nothing is random. There is a pattern—a design—for everything: weather, the forking of a tree’s branches, the shapes of clouds, constellations of stars. It’s just that the patterns are at a level of complexity our brains cannot possibly process, so we see them as random. And Tris imagines now a machine in a factory somewhere—a plant that may well be using one of his computer systems—punching a precise pattern of holes into thousands upon thousands of acoustic tiles, diligently, mindlessly repeating the same sequence of holes over and over again.
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